Now you can Write Mobile Apps on Your Mac

Did you know that you've been able to write mobile J2ME applications on a Mac for quite a while, but very few people have known that.

When you download Netbeans (In my case 6.7.1) for Mac OS X, you don't actually have an opportunity to download a version that has the Java ME view.

Fortunately, this is easily overcome by selecting Tools | Plugins | Available Plugins from Netbeans and looking for 'Visual Mobile Designer' and 'Mobility'. Note: Names differ slightly between platforms.

This will allow you to create new "Java ME" Projects -> Don't get too excited yet - you still need to integrate it with an Emulator - else, the IDE is going to moan like mad.

I would recommend downloading both mPowerPlayer (http://mpowerplayer.com/sdk) which is a little more reliable and the new Wireless Toolkit (WTK) for Mac. It's name has changed to Java ME SDK 3.0 (http://java.sun.com/javame/downloads/sdk30_mac.jsp) - it's an early access release, but it does work - a bit.

mPowerPlayer does not have an intaller, just unzip it somewhere and leave it there. The Sun Java ME SDK will install somewhere fine.

Now you need to integrate Netbeans with these buggers. Fortunately, Netbeans does all the autodetection required. Simply go to Tools | Java Platforms | Add Platform, navigate to the root folder of each installation respectively, and Netbeans will do the rest.

It's buggy, but at least you can now develop mobile applications on your beautiful Mac.

Enjoy!

SparkySpider

Ubuntu 8.10 vs Fedora 10

At first I was really impressed by Ubuntu.

Installation was simple and fast, Printers were a breeze, Synaptics Package Manager really worked for me.

After a while, I started changing my mind.

• Wireless network support would not work for me out the box
• VI had keyboard character encoding bugs in it
• There was no default support for my wireless network card
• Dictionary was useless, it didn't support pluarals, etc.
• No support for dual monitors on my ATI Radeon

I then installed Fedora, and am really enyoying it a lot more. All the above problems worked out of the box.